...Alexia Smit Critical accounts of plastic surgery television tend to explain women viewers' engagement with it either through comparisons to pornography and in terms of visual pleasure or by figuring the viewer as a docile, disciplined subject who reproduces the values espoused by the format. This...

...Heather Davis Plastic is a seemingly ubiquitous material, one that is both all too visible and, as such, opaque. Beginning with the use of plastic for sex toys, this essay tracks some of the strange convergences between plastic, as a material, and queer theory. In particular, it follows how...

... a woman who performs a masculinity that persists even after she is presumably cured through plastic surgery and conventional garb, indicating that masculinity is not necessarily aligned with appearance or anatomy. Crucially, Anna's felt sense that her scars persist after their removal—evoking the...

... refusal of the female body's objectification and also a catalyst for collectivization. Heather Davis argues that plastic is an opaque queerness, and Nathan Lee writes on the condition of being HIV undetectable as an optimistic imperceptible relationship to one's body. Across these texts, opacity operates...

... of misogynist plastic surgery reality
shows is particularly dispiriting. Though generally designed to be
uplifting rather than nasty, Dr. 90210, Body Work, and Plastic Sur-
gery: Before and After are antithetical to any feminist visions of the
world: a woman with C cup - sized breast implants...

... plastic surgery. Whereas reconstructive
surgery works on catastrophic, congenital or cancer-damage deform-
ities, cosmetic or aesthetic surgery is often an entirely elective endeavor.
And whereas reconstructive surgery is associated with the restoration
of health, normalcy...

... hoarders, plastic surgery junkies
to bridezillas — it saves a special invective for mothers whose desires
for fame drive them to “prostitute” themselves and their children
to the voracious appetites of fame. Mothers who actively work
for celebrity thus signal a form of unhealthy, even pathological...

... going to get dirty. But Miss Yvonne says,
“Don’t worry about that, you know my motto.” “No, what’s that
Pee-wee asks. “Be Prepared she exclaims, as she whips out a clear
plastic raincoat to cover her pale chiffon dress and billowing crinolines.
Pee-wee helps her put it on...

... ontological distinction between “linguistic” and
“plastic” representations that still reigns in aesthetic theory today?
This problem is crucial for the study of contemporary mass culture
and the newest forms of mass communication. Cinematic, televisual,
and other electronic media have already...

... impulses are converted into
exterior signs, physical symptoms, lends itself to a cinematic depiction.
(Freud had commented on the “plastic” portrayal of hysterical attacks.)
Rather than showing the actress flailing around in a “hysterical” attack,
we are given uncanny, rigid stillness. Although...

... interesting plastically
. . . (“Propos rompus,” Cahiendu Cinkma, no. 316 (Oct. 1980).
Here, it is clear that women are seen as more engrossing than men: they
are nntuvdly enigmatic (further, Godard suggests, this interest is some-
thing to be investigated-“As I am scientific and know certain...

... with its
serial now, and tantalizes spectators with the sense of something just
beyond view. The telephone makes the anonymous spaces of work
and domestic life plastic, and the film marks time through dialogue
(e.g., “It’s been four months . . . ”) and title cards (e.g., “Two Weeks
Later...

..., which function as authenticating markers within the
plastic mise-en-scène, points to a desire not only to protect the Car-
penters’ privacy and property but also very literally to preserve the
duo’s image(s). But it is the Carpenters’ music, used without per-
68 • Camera Obscura
mission, that...

..., installation, and
activist work. Touma is one of a few Lebanese women videomakers
who have explored gender. Interestingly, in a recent work she used
the technology not of video but of a greengrocer’s truck and sev-
eral kilos of marzipan. “Ode to Rhinos” sweetly critiqued the epi-
demic of plastic surgery...

... ads. A strikingly lovely
woman tells a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon that her modelling agency
has requested several changes to perfect her face. She presents him with
a computerized analysis that lists a series of minute “defects” to the mil-
limeter. Dr. Roberts has...

... photography to form a gendered and racialized
spectacle of sculpted and cast plastic prosthetic body parts. The figure
in Untitled #264 is in a common position for reclining female nudes
in Renaissance painting. Yet, this nude is not like a Renaissance nude,
nor any other kind of...

...
performance. Therefore it has to do with time and with the camera
working in a traditional kind of way - the recording of an action, not
changing the speed or plastically affecting the quality of the space. And,
if it has to do with time, it has to do with psychology, which means it has...

... happened once). Scenic: There
is some exotic ethnographic footage from the Land of Propp. And an
50 ocean voyage, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-in a fishtank, replete
with a blue plastic sea monster and several small goldfish. Novelty
Sort: Well, there are the hysterical interludes...

... — what Richard Schechner calls “restored behavior” and Judith
Butler “discursive production.”10 Thus is “Jeanne Cooper” a role
whose (re)construction comes into focus most sharply — and quite
literally — when she airs footage of her plastic surgery, but whose
cultivation also emerges in such...